Ordinary Grace

31

Karl Brandt came while Jake and I were doing the dishes. Like a beggar he appeared at the screen door off the kitchen. He stood there with his eyes downcast and when he asked for my father his voice wasn’t much above a whisper as if what he wanted was something he believed he had no right to ask for and no hope of getting.

Gus had left after dinner, taken off on his motorcycle, and although he didn’t say where my own thinking was that he’d gone back to see Ginger French. My father had gone to his church office to tend to some details of Ariel’s funeral.

I stood with the wet dishcloth still in my hand and told Karl where my father was and offered to go get him and asked if he wanted to come in and wait.

Karl shook his head. “Thanks, Frank. I’ll find him myself.”

When Karl had gone Jake and I looked at each other and it was clear we were both reading the same book. I put down the dishcloth and dried my hands on the legs of my pants and started for the door.

“Wait,” Jake said. I thought he was going to argue with me but he said, “We should give him a minute.”

We waited until we saw Karl enter the church then we broke from the house and ran across the street with the long yellow light of the low sun in our faces and hurried down the side stairs to the dark of the basement where I quickly pulled the rag stuffing from the furnace duct and we leaned close and barely breathed.

“. . I swear it,” Karl was saying. “I messed up I know. I shouldn’t have been drinking and I should have been watching out for Ariel, but I swear I would never hurt her, Mr. Drum. Ariel was my best friend. Sometimes I thought my only friend.”

“I’ve seen the group you run with, Karl. It’s not insignificant.”

“Nobody understood me like Ariel. Nobody.”

“Did you father her child?”

“No.”

“Yet, as Ruth pointed out this morning, you apparently told your friends that you were having sexual relations with Ariel.”

“I never said that, not outright. I said things that they took to mean that.”

“They misinterpreted?”

“Not exactly. Look, when you’re with guys, you’ve got to be a certain way, you know?”

“And that way is to appear to be sleeping with your girlfriend?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Even if it’s not true?”

Karl was quiet a long moment, then he said so low we almost missed it, “Maybe especially if it’s not true.”

“What do you mean?”

We heard the floorboards above us give as someone stood and began to pace. Nothing came down the duct for a while. Me, I’d’ve been pressing for an answer but my father’s patience was remarkable. A bug with about a million legs crawled out from under the furnace. Normally I would have stomped it but the silence in that church at the moment was profound and I didn’t want to risk giving us away. I saw Jake looking at the bug too but he made no move to kill it.

“It wasn’t me who got Ariel pregnant,” Karl said at last.

The pacing above us had stopped far to my left and I figured Karl was at the window which looked toward the setting sun. In my mind’s eye I could see his face lit with that dying yellow light.

“Ariel and I were friends but not that way,” he said.

“I don’t understand, Karl.”

“Mr. Drum, I. .”

He faltered and his voice broke and what came to us next was the sound of deep heartbreaking sobs.

The floorboards above us gave again as my father crossed the room to where Karl Brandt stood.

“It’s all right, Karl. It’s all right, son.”

“No. . it. . isn’t,” Karl said between gasps. “It’s sick. It’s awful. It’s depraved.”

“What is it, Karl?”

“Don’t you understand?” Karl’s voice was suddenly vicious, a wet rage of tears. “I didn’t like Ariel that way. I’ve never liked girls that way. I don’t think of them at all that way. See? Now do you see?”

“Ah,” my father said. And it was clear that he did.

“I’m a faggot. I’m a freak. I’m a sick freak. I’m a-”

“Karl, Karl, it’s all right.”

“No, it’s not all right. All my life I’ve watched other boys to make sure I was acting just like them. I’d say to myself, ‘This is how a boy walks. This is how a boy talks. This is how a boy doesn’t notice other boys.’ When I was a kid, I didn’t understand what was going on with me. And when it finally dawned on me, I couldn’t stomach who I was. Who I am.”

“You’re a child of God.”

“A sick God.”

“No, a God who loves you.”

“If he loved me he’d have made me just like other boys.”

“I don’t think you’re a freak. I don’t think you’re sick.”

“No, you just think I’m a murderer.”

“I don’t. I never did.”

“Right.”

“What I saw in you always was a young man who befriended my daughter and who entered my house respectfully. I know you made mistakes, but not once in all this horrible mess have I ever thought you might have killed Ariel. That’s the absolute truth.”

My father spoke in a voice that held no heat of argument but only a gentle invitation to believe. It was the way he spoke about God in his sermons.

“Karl, does anyone know about this?”

“I’ve never told anyone, not even Ariel.”

“But she knew?”

“I think she figured it out, but we never talked about it.”

“Did you know she was pregnant?”

“The argument we had that everyone keeps bringing up, it was about the baby.”

“What about the baby?”

“I told her-Mr. Drum, I’m sorry about this, but I thought it was best-I told her I knew of a doctor in Rochester who could take care of the situation.”

“An abortion?”

“Yes, sir, an abortion. But she absolutely refused. She was going to have the baby and raise it here in New Bremen.”

“Did she talk about the father?”

“She never would tell me that.”

“Do you have a speculation?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“She was sneaking out at night to see someone, but you have no idea who that was?”

“I don’t, honestly. Ariel, when she wanted to, could be very secretive. That’s one of the things that I liked about her. She kept secrets, her own and those told to her. I guess you’d call it integrity. Mr. Drum, you won’t tell anyone what I’ve told you?”

“No, Karl.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if people knew. The only reason I told you was because you have integrity, like Ariel, and I didn’t want you to go on thinking I had anything to do with what happened to her, because I never would. I miss her, Mr. Drum. I miss her terribly.”

“We all do.”

The door at the top of the basement steps opened and I thought Gus had come back and because I was afraid he’d make noise and give us away I quickly stuffed the wadding back into the furnace duct. Jake and I turned and found to our surprise that it wasn’t Gus but Doyle. He wasn’t wearing his uniform. When he saw where we stood he didn’t have to be a genius to know what we were up to.

“I’m looking for Gus,” he said.

“He’s not here,” I replied.

Doyle came toward us slowly. “That’s Karl Brandt’s Triumph in the church lot. He’s talking with your dad?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Have they finished?”

“Pretty much.”

“You boys get an earful?”

Doyle kept coming and Jake took a step back.

“Anything I should know?” Doyle looked at me first but what we’d just heard was something I knew my father wouldn’t want us to share. He moved between us, separating us, and he turned fully toward Jake and towered over him.

“So tell me, Jakie, did he confess to killing your sister?”

Jake squeezed his face together and whether it was an effort to hold words in or to get them out I couldn’t say.

Doyle leaned down so that his face and Jake’s were separated by no more than the length of a Popsicle stick. “Well? Did he confess?”

Jake’s lips trembled and his fists clenched and he finally spat out, “He’s not a m-m-m-murderer. He’s just a f-f-faggot, wh-wh-whatever that is.”

Doyle’s eyes bloomed wide with surprise and he straightened up. “Faggot?” he said. “Jakie, you’re going to tell me everything.”

I lay in bed that night more confused than ever. Too many things had happened in the day-the altercation between Julia Brandt and my mother, Mother’s desertion of us, Karl Brandt’s astounding confession, and our buckling under the questioning of Doyle who’d hounded Jake and me until he knew the whole of what we’d heard-and I felt twisted and wrung out. I was almost able to make some sense of these things but something else had happened that day which was far worse and for which I had no explanation or understanding and that made me feel absolutely lousy. It was simply this: For a little while I’d forgotten about Ariel and I’d been happy. Jesus, Ariel was dead only a week and not even in the ground yet and I’d forgotten her. It hadn’t been a long lapse in grieving, only the time with Ginger French and fixing dinner with Gus and eating and talking around the table and laughing. Her death had come back to me the moment Karl Brandt’s tragic face appeared at the screen door. Still I felt like a traitor, the worst kind of brother Ariel could have had.

Jake said, “Frank?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Karl. About him being a faggot and all.”

That was the word Doyle had kept coming back to when he hounded us, using it like the word was a nail and his voice a hammer.

“Don’t say that word,” I told him. “If you’ve got to say anything, say homosexual.”

Which was the term my mother employed occasionally in her discussions of artists. She never said the word in a derogatory manner and I knew she didn’t care if someone was inclined that way. Among my friends, however, fag was the word you typically used and you used it like a sharp stick.

Jake was quiet and I said, “Sorry, go on.”

Jake said, “He’s afraid people will make fun of him, and that’s why he never told anyone.”

“So?”

“I don’t like to talk to people because I’m afraid I’ll stutter and they’ll make fun of me. I feel like a freak sometimes.”

I rolled over and looked at his bed. The bulb over the bathroom sink was on and some of the light splashed off the wall in the hallway and fell into our room. Mostly all I could see was the gray outline of my brother under his sheet. There wasn’t much to him and I thought about all the times he’d taken crap from other kids when I was around and I realized it was probably only a small percentage of all the crap he’d taken over all the years for something that was not his fault and that he could not help. And I felt even more like a rotten brother and a rotten person in general, the kind who only let people down.

“You’re not a freak,” I said almost angrily.

“Do you think Karl’s a freak?”

I thought about that and decided there was probably something different about everybody and Karl’s way of being different was no worse than anybody else’s.

“No,” I said.

“Do you think he was telling the truth about him and Ariel?”

“Yes.”

We were quiet a long time. I didn’t know what he was thinking but I was thinking that I wanted desperately to be someone better than I was. Finally I heard him yawn and saw him turn toward the wall to sleep and the last thing he said to me that night was, “So do I.”